Net Mourns Passing of Giant

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Net Mourns Passing of Giant

Tributes and eulogies poured over the Net this weekend as friends and colleagues mourned the passing of Jon Postel, the "father of the Internet." He died late Friday at age 55, from complications following cardiac surgery.

Postel was the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the non-profit body that allocates IP addresses. He was also a founding member of the Internet Architecture Board, a trustee of the Internet Society and the caretaker of the .US domain.

"He was one of the foundations of why the Internet exists, the underlying infrastructure is a tribute to a bunch of selfless people," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive Project and inventor of the WAIS Internet searching scheme.

"Everyone else was getting rich and these guys were trying to keep the infrastructure together," Kahle said.

Postel survived a heart valve replacement in 1991, but recently that valve had begun leaking. He died suddenly while recovering from surgery to replace it.

In recent months, Postel had been at the center of a whirl of controversy surrounding the formation of a new Internet government. On 2 October, Postel submitted his final proposal for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to the Clinton administration. That new non-profit group is expected to assume Postel's former role as the guardian of the Internet's underlying infrastructure.

Vint Cerf – co-author of the Internet Protocol, chairman of the Internet Society and a colleague and friend of Postel – posted a moving tribute to Postel to mailing lists.

In the tribute, Cerf pledged to establish the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, posthumously declaring Postel its first recipient.

Members of the networking and domain name community reacted to the news of Postel's death with shock and sorrow.

"Humanity lost a defender today," wrote Paul Vixie, a consultant, engineer and the creator of Berkeley Internet Name Domain, the code libraries that allow Domain Name System lookups to occur, in an email.

"Against the squalid backdrop of human nature one man tested his mettle against the forces of chaos and entropy, without regard for his own personal safety, and gave our civilization some extra time to get itself organized before advancing along the track of history," Vixie said.

"Jon Postel's passing is a loss of extraordinary proportions," wrote Ken Stubbs, the chairman of the Internet Council of Registrars. "His vision of a world drawn together through a vast common communications network has become a reality, and his genius and leadership were the key to its realization."

Others remembered Postel's altruism:

"Jon's contributions ushered the Internet through a long series of very important and difficult decisions," said Bill Norton, former chair of the North American Network Operators' Group and a personal friend of Postel.

"He has worked for Information Sciences Institute, solely for the good of the Internet, for as long as I have known him."

"Jon was a man of great integrity," said Norton, a friend of Postel and colleague who had worked with him on the Routing Arbiter Project since 1994. "He was not swayed by the hype and monetary interests that [have more recently] driven the Internet."

Tara Lemmey, an online privacy advocate, said that Postel worked in the background, out of the limelight, and that many now take his work for granted.

"He was really nice and he really got it," said Lemmey, who had been consulting closely with Postel on the future of the .us top-level domain, which Postel managed as part of his responsibilities at the Information Sciences Institute.

"He had great ethics and a really sincere sense about the community. He was really trying to come up with the right solution," said Lemmey.

"There is a whole group of first-generation Internet pioneers that are all like that, and they are really wonderful. It is all about getting information to people and making the Internet a better place. It is really sad."

One network administrator proposed that all Web sites should change their background colors to black in honor of Postel's passing.

"When Marconi died, the entire world observed two minutes radio silence," wrote Nigel Roberts, administrator of the Channel Islands Domain Name Registry on a mailing list devoted to the future of Internet governance.

"Jon Postel's contributions to worldwide communications are every bit the equal of Marconi and I feel [turning our site black] is the least [I] could do," wrote Roberts.

The Network Information Center for the Chilean country code domain has also turned its page black, and others around the world are expected to follow suit in tribute.